LOS ANGELES The Los Angeles City Council has signed off on a 16-year contract to buy energy from a wind farm in Wyoming.

State Rep. Ken Tschumper, DFL-La Crescent, hosted a community forum last week featuring a panel of environmentalists. Tschumper and others question whether the project's estimates of demand are accurate. He also is concerned that ratepayers could end up financing a project that could harm the area's environment. Other worries include possible health effects and what the potentially 150-foot-high transmission towers would do to the region's scenery. "There are decisions being made here with this high-voltage transmission line ... that are going to impact people's lives for the next 30 or 40 years," Tschumper said.

A Chicago-based wind energy company has submitted its first permit applications to build a massive wind farm south of Marseilles. La Salle County Environmental Services and Land Use department on Tuesday received 66 wind turbine permit applications from Invenergy LLC, based in Chicago, for the first phase of a large wind farm development in La Salle County. The development is projected to have 233 turbines spanning parts of Brookfield, Grand Rapids and Allen townships when it is finished. For now, La Salle County's zoning ordinance only allows one 100 megawatt wind farm to be constructed at a time. Since each turbine will produce 1.5 mega-watts, Invenergy must break the project into phases. The first phase will be no more than 66 turbines.

A Louisiana company was awarded leases to four tracts Tuesday in Texas' first open bidding for offshore wind power in the Gulf of Mexico. Wind Energy Systems Technology, already developing a wind farm eight miles off of Galveston, was the only bidder for the tracts. ...Though it's not clear why more companies didn't bid on the offshore tracts, it may be that many are busy with wind power projects on land in Texas, said Christine Real de Azua, spokeswoman for the American Wind Energy Association.

O'Malley, who failed to get a wind-power bill through the General Assembly last year, is expected to announce details of new legislation Monday. But this time around, O'Malley may have to take into account labor's demand to have its role guaranteed in the legislation. If not resolved, the issue could split the union-environmentalist coalition that backed the bill last year.

The Shetland Labour Party has contributed to the ongoing Viking Energy windfarm consultation by suggesting a referendum to decide if local people want to receive direct financial payments from the proposed windfarm or have profits looked after for them via a trust should the scheme go ahead. The party is also advocating transparency by the directors of Shetland Aerogenerators and Viking Energy regarding how much they stand to gain from their directorships and any other involvement in the industry.

Welsh Conservatives today called on the Labour Party to clear up growing confusion over whether it supports the controversial Gwynt y Môr wind farm off the North Wales coast.

EVERY person in Scotland is to be offered a green loyalty card which will reward them for making purchases that help the environment. The Scottish executive is behind the scheme, which ministers hope will offer an incentive to consumers to choose products that cut waste and reduce carbon emissions.

Ministers are planning a U-turn on Britain's pledges to combat climate change that "effectively abolishes" its targets to rapidly expand the use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show that Gordon Brown will be advised today that the target Tony Blair signed up to this year for 20% of all European energy to come from renewable sources by 2020 is expensive and faces "severe practical difficulties". ...The shift in stance is due to be discussed at full cabinet next week. Last night a spokesman for the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said: "We don't comment on ministerial meetings with the PM."

Blalack could not answer board member Barbara Vena's question on why Walmart wanted to add the wind turbines in addition to the solar panels. Smith said there was no further room on the store's roof for additional solar panels.

Lack of action on a tax abatement for a company looking to build a series of wind generators in western Cooke and eastern Montague counties could send the alternative energy project to other counties, a spokesman said Monday. The Cooke County Commissioners Court took no action in its Monday meeting to give or deny Florida Power and Light a tax abatement for a series of gargantuan wind-powered electric generators on about 10,000 acres in western Cooke County. ...“The lack of action will probably kill this deal, and we’ll now have to reconsider our investment in Cooke County,” Edwin Giraldo, project manager for Florida Power and Light, said in an interview following the meeting. ...“The bottom line is that there is opposition to the windfarm, regardless of the benefits it would provide,” he said.

Penn Wind CEO Justin Dunkelberger informed the Northumberland County commissioners Tuesday that he doesn't have the financing or the $50,000 land lease payment due April 20 to move a proposed $30 million wind turbine project forward.

Giant trucks are heading to Lewis County. They're transporting parts to the wind farm project. How they're getting there is causing some problems. The trucks travel from the port of Oswego into Lewis County.

The developers of the proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm said yesterday that they would not meet a deadline to qualify for a 30 percent federal cash grant for the project. However, it is not clear if the cost of Cape Wind's electricity will rise, because the project could receive numerous other federal financial incentives.

Driving through western Kansas, you'll see hundreds of whirling wind turbines. But you won't see lots of people - or high-voltage power lines. And that is the big obstacle to realizing the wind-energy potential of Kansas and the Midwest: You can put up all the towers and turbines you like, but without more transmission lines, the added electricity won't get to the cities that could use it. Those lines will take years to build and cost tens of billions of dollars - if they are built at all.

Offshore wind farms, such as the one planned off the Sussex County coast, will have to wait to gain federal approval because of a laborious effort to regulate the technology. Bluewater Wind, bolstered by an endorsement from four state agencies last week, hopes to build as many as 200 wind turbines in the Atlantic. The company says its turbines will generate pollution-free electricity at a stable price. At the direction of the state agencies, negotiations have begun between Bluewater and Delmarva Power for a long-term power purchase agreement. But even if they strike a deal, and the company wins state and local permits to build an offshore wind farm, Bluewater will have one time-consuming hurdle left.

"It might be time to pull it, put it away, put our energies into some other projects," he said Tuesday. "[Let's] keep what we have for research, put it in a file. Maybe someday someone will want to talk about it, but at this time I just don't see it going anywhere."

there's a missing ingredient that has slowed development of wind power and other renewable energy sources in Colorado and the West: adequate transmission lines. Where the wind tends to blow, there is little population that would be served by wind energy. To move the wind power to populous metro areas requires steep investments by wind-farm developers. High-power lines can cost from $300,000 to $1 million per mile to build.

A newly formed alliance of landowners in southeast Wyoming says its has more than 6,000 megawatts of wind energy resources, but not enough power line transmission to finalize deals with developers. ...The alliance went before the Wyoming Infrastructure Authority board last week to advocate that more electrical transmission capacity be made available to independent generators.

Scotland's much-vaunted network of wind turbines was barely producing enough electricity to boil 1,000 kettles at times this week. On occasions the total output was a meagre 3MW (megawatts) - the equivalent of a single turbine working at normal speed. The reason was simply a lack of wind, due to the massive area of high pressure sitting over much of Britain for the past few weeks.